Color-Changing Materials Are Elastic (And Scalable)

A team of engineers at MIT is working on a new technique for developing stretchy, color-changing, synthetic materials that are scalable and inexpensive.

“Scaling these materials is not trivial, because you need to control these structures at the nanoscale,” says Benjamin Miller , a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Now that we’ve cleared this scaling hurdle, we can explore questions like: Can we use this material to make robotic skin that has a human-like sense of touch? And can we create touch-sensing devices for things like virtual augmented reality or medical training? It’s a big space we’re looking at now.”